distic
1d ago
You can feed it to some other animal then, the cow is the worse.
distic
1d ago
Yes but we wouldn't produce the forage in the first place. Or you can burn it to produce energy (and CO2 is still better than CH4)
distic
1d ago
The land used for the grass and the cereals could be used for something else (growing trees, for example). And by eating the grass and anything green in the grass cow do prevent trees to grow.
Moreover the grass produces CO2 if it's not eaten by some other animal while the cow produces CH4. CH4 has a stronger greenhouse effect than CO2 and then it quite rapidly degrades and becomes CO2.
distic
1d ago
I don't know how the beef lobby computes it (and whether they import cereal from foreign countries) but if you take account for all animal feed (not just beef) it is more than 7%:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-cereals-animal-feed?tab=chart
release more methane than would be released by the natural decomposition of the forage material?
Honestly I don't know but the point is not to let the cereal decompose, that would be dumb. It's to use those lands to produce something else, something that wouldn't produce any CH4 and ideally that would absorb a bit of it. Anyway it would be better to burn the cereals and to produce energy with it (we get no CH4 - worse than CO2 - and more energy).
distic
1d ago
Yes it is a cycle, but if you replace a cycle where the carbon exists 500 years as a tree and 70 years as CO2 by a cycle where it exists 1 year as corn, 14 years as a cow and 70 years as CO2 it has a huge impact on the quantity of CO2 in the air.
Anyway oil is also natural, it did not magically appear under the ground. It's just a very long cycle.
And by the way I don't care about vegans, anyone thinking bees should consent to give you their honey is dumb
distic
1d ago
I meant CH4, and the problem is not the ranching it's the cereal production to feed cows.
distic
2d ago
I don't think the main point against eating animal meat is the fact that it kills animals, but the impact on environment and the land efficiency. To eat a pound of beef, you need the cow to eat a lot of grass, which takes a lot more land than producing a pound of vegetables. Moreover, cows produce a lot of CO which has a huge climate impact.
distic
2d ago
People here take the view that it is somehow related to modern feminism, but it might not be. Women, for centuries (at least since Lucretia killed herself), have been trained to think that a rape was worse than death, because death takes your life but rape takes your honor, and in this old-fashioned theory a life without honor is not worth living. Moreover, women have also be trained to say they don't want sex ; if they admit they would prefer to be with a man than with a bear, what would people think? Do you really think Lucretia would have preferred the man over the bear?
I'm not saying it has nothing to do with modern feminism. Actually, I think the old fashioned honor is responsible for a large part of modern feminism, as opposed to earlier feminism. In the seventies with the sexual liberation movement the accent was on having more sex, not less. The idea of a rape was somewhat conservative, as it assumed that it was important to women to not have sex in some circumstances. By the way, it also lead to a lot of abuses. With AIDS, Reagan and Thatcher, the conservative gained ground and feminists began to insist on the consent of women and her individual rights as opposed to "sexual freedom". The modern emphasis on rape is a result of both earlier feminism and the conservative ideology.
The reason is that people eat a lot of beef. Farmers don't try to optimize the environmental impact of our food, they optimize their revenue (and they are right to do so).
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